Lyft is a ridesharing company based in San Francisco that operates in 644 cities in the USA. Lyft is the second largest ridesharing company in the United States after Uber, according to Second Measure.
Recently, Lyft decided to introduce new rules and block all accounts where there was obscene language detected. However, innocent people with surnames like “Dick,” “Finger,” and “Cummings,” which, according to the company, sound incorrect, suffered from this.
They tried their best, you know the rest. Twitter is full of tweets from victims who can no longer use the services of the company just because they have the “inappropriate” last name.
On Thursday, Lyft’s algorithm began flagging certain users’ names — you know, the kind that might earn a giggle on the school playground like “Cummings” or “Dick” — as inappropriate. These users received alerts from the ridesharing company, warning them to change their display name to something less naughty or risk losing access to their account.
“Some members of the Lyft community were using names that were either inaccurate, offensive, or both,” the spokesperson said. “In trying to fix the problem, we cast too wide of a net. We were well-intentioned, but our response led to errors that we are working to correct, and we apologize.”
Lyft didn’t respond to inquiries about how many users were affected. The company’s Twitter bot could be seen all of Thursday requesting information from affected customers.
Many users are so outraged, though, that they no longer want to use the services of the company.
